Re: One-shot high-resolution POSIX timer periodically late

From: John
Date: Thu Jan 25 2007 - 07:04:27 EST


[ Re-sending in the hope that it will be archived ]

Ingo Molnar wrote:

John Stultz wrote:

On Wed, 2007-01-24 at 10:41 +0100, John wrote:

I'm using the POSIX timers API. My platform is x86 running Linux
2.6.18.6 patched with the high-resolution timer subsystem.

http://www.tglx.de/hrtimers.html

My process is the only SCHED_FIFO process on the system. There are no user-space processes with a higher priority. AFAICT, only a kernel thread could keep the CPU away from my app.

Is there a periodic kernel thread that runs every 2 seconds, cannot be preempted, and runs for over 50 µs??

This sounds like a BIOS SMI issue. Can you reproduce this behavior on different hardware?

note that only the -hrt patchset is used - not the full -rt patchset
- so 50 usecs delays (and more) are quite possible and common.

Ingo,

You are correct, I only used -hrt.
I will _definitely_ give -rt a try.

I am fully aware that an occasional 100 µs delay is possible, given a
soft real-time operating system. However, what I cannot explain is:

Why do these /occasional/ delays always happen a multiple of 2 seconds
apart? Can you explain this odd behavior?

My question would be: does the same problem occur with the full -rt
patchset and PREEMPT_RT? (see http://rt.wiki.kernel.org for details)

I will test on a different PC, as John suggested.
I will try the full -rt patchset in a few days.

+++++

On a related note, there is no -hrt patch for 2.6.19:
http://www.tglx.de/projects/hrtimers/
Is it because the patch for 2.6.19-rc4-mm1 applies cleanly to 2.6.19?

There is no -hrt patch for 2.6.20.
Has it been completely merged?

Regards.

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